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Not a feel-good mother-daughter book
May. 30th, 2014 03:59 pmSo my Classics book club has an occasional habit of dipping into “modern classics,” which is something of a contradiction-in-terms, and usually means “stuff marketed as litfic.” One of these days I’m going to start skipping these, as so far I don’t often like them. I’m not sure why I decided to participate in reading Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love, but I am rather glad I did, as I like it much more than any of the other “modern classics” we’ve read.
I almost never read litfic, as I have Issues And Opinions with its existence as a genre-but-not-a-genre and the many varied and contradictory ways in which it is defined, particularly the ones whose relation to “literary quality” as it is understood in literature studies is tenuous or nonexistent. Luckily, the elements of litfic that got Troubling Love sold as litfic seem to be mostly “contemporary realism,” “it’s a psychological novel,” “nonlinear storytelling,” and “an abundance of metaphor that has become unfashionable in other types of writing," none of which I particularly detest. It is blessedly not about a university professor lusting philosophically after his students.
If I were to assign Troubling Love to a proper genre, it would be a family drama. Specifically, it’s about family secrets! Family secrets are rather fun. In this case, the book is more about the process of dredging back up the family secrets, piecing together the past bit by bit as our narrator wanders around Naples getting assaulted and having awkward conversations, sometimes learning new information and sometimes uncovering her own long-buried memories, than it is about what the secrets actually are.
Our narrator is Delia, a middle-aged Italian woman who is mostly estranged from her family, with the exception that her mother Amalia comes and stays with her every now and again. One time Amalia is supposed to come see her, and doesn’t show up, but then calls her on the phone and is weird, and then she turns up drowned, wearing only a fancy bra even though she never wore fancy bras. This largely sets the tone for the rest of the novel, the bulk (I use the word loosely; the book is less than 150 pages long) of which takes place in Naples in the days following Amalia’s funeral.
Delia’s mother was a seamstress; her father was a middlingly talented painter with an explosive temper, extreme jealousy issues, and a penchant for domestic violence. The father’s business partner or friend of the family or something was a local lecher called Caserta (apparently not named Caserta, just called that), and Delia’s father was afraid that Caserta liked Amalia too much or possibly the other way ‘round or maybe both. Amalia may have been dating Caserta before she died; this is one of the many mysteries that Delia must untangle by poking around her mother’s apartment and Naples generally.
A lot of this book is about sex, but none of it is at all remotely sexy. (This seems to be what “realism” means.) As a result, some of it’s a rather uncomfortable reading experience, and I am apprehensively curious about what the group discussion is going to be like.
I almost never read litfic, as I have Issues And Opinions with its existence as a genre-but-not-a-genre and the many varied and contradictory ways in which it is defined, particularly the ones whose relation to “literary quality” as it is understood in literature studies is tenuous or nonexistent. Luckily, the elements of litfic that got Troubling Love sold as litfic seem to be mostly “contemporary realism,” “it’s a psychological novel,” “nonlinear storytelling,” and “an abundance of metaphor that has become unfashionable in other types of writing," none of which I particularly detest. It is blessedly not about a university professor lusting philosophically after his students.
If I were to assign Troubling Love to a proper genre, it would be a family drama. Specifically, it’s about family secrets! Family secrets are rather fun. In this case, the book is more about the process of dredging back up the family secrets, piecing together the past bit by bit as our narrator wanders around Naples getting assaulted and having awkward conversations, sometimes learning new information and sometimes uncovering her own long-buried memories, than it is about what the secrets actually are.
Our narrator is Delia, a middle-aged Italian woman who is mostly estranged from her family, with the exception that her mother Amalia comes and stays with her every now and again. One time Amalia is supposed to come see her, and doesn’t show up, but then calls her on the phone and is weird, and then she turns up drowned, wearing only a fancy bra even though she never wore fancy bras. This largely sets the tone for the rest of the novel, the bulk (I use the word loosely; the book is less than 150 pages long) of which takes place in Naples in the days following Amalia’s funeral.
Delia’s mother was a seamstress; her father was a middlingly talented painter with an explosive temper, extreme jealousy issues, and a penchant for domestic violence. The father’s business partner or friend of the family or something was a local lecher called Caserta (apparently not named Caserta, just called that), and Delia’s father was afraid that Caserta liked Amalia too much or possibly the other way ‘round or maybe both. Amalia may have been dating Caserta before she died; this is one of the many mysteries that Delia must untangle by poking around her mother’s apartment and Naples generally.
A lot of this book is about sex, but none of it is at all remotely sexy. (This seems to be what “realism” means.) As a result, some of it’s a rather uncomfortable reading experience, and I am apprehensively curious about what the group discussion is going to be like.